The subject matter of this specification relates generally to machine translation.
The World Wide Web (the “web”) includes web pages having text content written in a wide variety of natural languages. To avoid the time and expense of translating these web pages manually, machine translation systems have been adapted to translate text in web pages. For example, some online machine translation services allow a user to submit a Universal Resource Locator (URL) of a web page. The translation service obtains text from the web page located at the submitted URL, translates the text, and outputs a translation for display to the user.
A drawback of machine translation systems is that such systems may assume that the text has correct spelling. Any incorrectly spelled word in the input text may result in an incorrect, incomplete, or incomprehensible translation. Asking the author of the web page or the user requesting the translation to correct the spelling in the web page would generally be impractical.